I was the one in control this time. I had to be.
She cried out against my ear, massaging my length, and I let go at last, the climax firing through me so raw and real it seemed to surge from my very soul.
I locked my elbows to stop myself from collapsing on top of her and letting her know how completely she’d destroyed me.
It was sex—only sex.
The chemistry had always been phenomenal between us and it seemed that had not changed.
It was five years, though, since I’d felt this exhausted, this limp from a simple orgasm. And I knew it was pointless trying to deny it any longer.
Where Belle was concerned there had always been more between us than just chemistry.
It would be good if this time we could feed the desire without guilt, but as I rolled off her, covering my face with my forearm, struggling to catch my breath before I spoke, I felt her stiffen beside me and knew we could not.
Because now, instead of Remy between us, there was the boy.
She’d come here to find out what my intentions were towards the child and perhaps it was time I admitted my misgivings about fatherhood.
She shifted, ready to run again, and I gathered enough of my energy to grasp her wrist before she could escape.
‘I should leave,’ she whispered, her naked body shivering. ‘I need to get back to Cai.’
The room was warm, the night air sultry as it flowed in through the open doors of the terrace, the terrace on which I’d stood, thinking of her every night I’d been back to the villa since seeing her again, since that damn kiss.
‘Not yet. We need to talk about the boy,’ I managed to say around the sickening regret in my throat.
‘I can’t...’ Her voice broke as she twisted her wrist free of my grasp. ‘I can’t talk about him now, let’s talk about it tomorrow.’
She scrambled off the bed, her fear almost palpable as she gathered the clothes she had taken off with such artless seduction moments before. The moon glowed on her pale skin and I became momentarily mesmerised again. As I watched her slip on her panties, hook her bra with shaking fingers, the heat swelled my shaft again.
I forced myself to climb off the bed, walk to the chest of drawers and pull out a pair of sweat pants.
The chemistry was still there, and more volatile than ever, but I was through trying to avoid it. Trying to avoid her.
Once she had shimmied back into the simple summer dress that looked more sophisticated to me than a courtesan’s ball gown, she hunted around for her sandals.
I scooped them off the floor, but as she reached for them I whisked them out of her grasp.
The moonlight shone on her face as she stared at me. I could see the beginnings of beard burn on her cheeks where I had devoured her mouth before devouring so much else. The taste of her—sweet and musky, wet with need—taunted me still.
‘Please, Alexi, I have to go,’ she said desperately, but I could hear her struggle to keep the fear out of her voice. ‘I can’t...’ A guilty flush burned her neck. ‘This shouldn’t have happened—it’s not why I came here.’
We both knew on some level that was a lie. Maybe her decision hadn’t been conscious, any more than mine had been to avoid the boy simply so I could avoid her too, but that cat was out of the bag now, and there would be no shoving it back in again. Even so, I needed to be careful with her.
She looked freaked out. I wondered again at her experience. How could she still seem like that young, artless girl when she was the mother of a child, my child?
‘Maybe, but you did come here, so perhaps it is best we discuss the reason why. Do you want me to have more contact with the boy?’ I asked.
‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘I understand now why you’ve been avoiding us. I should have—’
‘No, you don’t,’ I interrupted.
She’d apologised before, but she hadn’t been wrong about my reasons for avoiding contact, not entirely. Perhaps it was time I took some share of the blame for my son’s fatherless existence.
‘Yes, I do,’ she said. ‘You wanted to avoid...’ She gesticulated with her hands between us, in an entirely inadequate expression of the explosion of hormones and pheromones, wants and needs held in a pressure cooker for five years, that had just occurred. ‘You wanted to avoid this happening again. After that kiss, I should have realised we couldn’t be in the same space again without a chaperone, and yet I came up here anyway to...’
‘Shh, Belle.’ I pressed a thumb to her lips to silence the words and the anguish and guilt behind them. ‘What happened was inevitable,’ I said. ‘Avoiding you and my responsibilities to the boy was never going to stop that.’